Warm up: Daily Seven + one rep higher than first week. Then LBD: Lower Body Development Pick 5-7 exercises that work out your abdomen and legs. Do one until you can't. Jog in place or sprint for a minute to shake it off. Do the next one. Lather, rinse, repeat for each exercise, for 30 minutes. Cool down, clean up, breakfast, and then on to the last day of fieldcraft.
At this point, if it doesn't hurt a little, you ain't training. No one ever drowned in sweat.
Welcome to Wednesday morning of Week Two. Daily Seven as usual, one rep more for each exercise than what you did in Week One. The run today bumps up to 3/4 mile, shooting for a six-minute pace. Then max-effort pull-ups, one minute bursts of sit-ups, one minute of pushups, alternated until you can't do them any more, or for a half hour. In between, 60-second jogs, sprints, and shaking it out. Then the usual: cool down, hydrate, and change over for Day 11.
You can work out anywhere. If those water jugs are full, that's about an
85-90 pound bar. Using the cases of MREs as workout weights is
probably better than eating them anyways.
T9 Hours 1 and 2
It's your second Tuesday, which means it's the UBD (Upper Body Development) circuit today. Your Daily Seven are still 11 reps (or one more than whatever you started at last week) apiece for warm-up.
Then it's all about the shoulders, upper back, and arms. Pick out your exercises. The first one should be pull-ups (if you have a bar for that), and pushups if you don't. Max out on whichever. Keep track mentally of how many you did. Then jog in place or for a minute, then the next exercise until you can't, or for two minutes, run in place or on a course for a minute while you shake them out, then do another exercise. As many times as you can in thirty minutes. If you picked 7 upper body exercises, you should finish at least one and possibly two complete circuits of exercise/run/exercise/run/etc. If you picked 5 exercises, you should make it through two-three complete cycles. If you're working the entire two minutes and not burning out, shorten the recovery period to 30 seconds; today is for UBD, not cardio.
When the thirty minutes is up, repeat either the pull-ups or push-ups, max effort. Compare the number you did the last time to the first time.
Then cool down, walk it off, shake everything out, and get cleaned up. Classes start after breakfast.
Monday of Week Two dawning means you've moved up a notch.
You'll add a rep to every exercise in the Daily Seven. Then max push-ups, max sit-up in a minute and twenty seconds, and off for a 1/2 mile at a four minute pace.
Then cool down, change over, hydrate, and breakfast. Fieldcraft classes start today.
Take a walk. Stretch. Let the muscles recuperate. Don't be totally sedentary. Move them around some. If the opportunity arises, try a field sport: softball, soccer. Or a more leisurely bike ride. In fact, as a rule, start doing your self a favor: park your car at the far end of the parking lot, in the most distant row, or the opposite end of the mall, every time. Walk farther every day. It's a gift to yourself that'll pay dividends forever.
But don't try to destroy the muscles every day with a heavy workout, or they'll never have a chance to grow. So at least one day a week, and at most two, take it easy.
You'll be tearing it up again tomorrow.
Rifle instruction continues at 10AM on the training schedule.
Today would be Saturday in the first training week.
Same Daily Seven, same number of reps, for stretching and warm-up.
After that, it's all about the cardio today.
Walk fast, jog, ride a bike, swim. (Show-shoeing and cross-country skiing count in winter, in snow, for those of you who live in that nonsense.)
1) You're going for 15-20 minutes, minimum, of sustained cardiac exercise. You should be doing 20-30 minutes realistically, and beyond even that if you can.
2) Whatever you're doing, you heart needs to be working in the target zone. Max Heart Rate = 220 minus Your age in years.
220 - A = MHR
If you're 18, your max heart rate is 202. If you're 50, it's dropped to 170. You can't lie to the calendar.
(If you're extremely sedentary, out of shape, or shaped like a feral sow, you won't be starting anywhere near that max.)
3) Once you know your max, your workout should be aiming to get and sustain your heart rate at your Target Heart rate, which is 55-85% of your max rate (or 60%-90%, depending on what/who you read. I'll stick with the more conservative numbers, but you can adjust to the higher numbers at your own preference, and your own risk).
Same 18 year old = 111-172 bpm Same 50 year old = 94-145 bpm
Max rate X (0.55 to 0.85) = workout zone Target Heart Rate
Here's what it looks like on a panel graph:
If you're past 55, and so fat and out of shape that your RHR (Resting Heart rate) is 95, just getting off your fat ass constitutes a light work out.
Check your pulse (carotid [neck] or radial [wrist]), using fingers, not thumb. Count for 15 seconds. Multiply that number times 4 (or count for 10 seconds, and multiple times 6). That's your current HR, or near enough.
Do it while you're exercising, or get a pulse watch or pulse oximeter with a pulse function to check it while you're working out.
If it hurts in your chest, and you're over 35, STOP. See your doctor. It if only hurts in your legs, and you're sweating, congratulations. You've discovered how PT cardio works.
Less than 15 minutes doesn't exercise your heart muscle enough to get any benefit. More than 30 is fine, but use that zone for when you need to improve on past performance. We don't care how fast you get from point A to point B for this, we only care that you're exercising your heart into the target zone, at whatever speed over the ground, etc..
Side benefit: as you get fitter, your heart muscle will need less beats to do the same work. (This is why long distance runners have resting pulse rates in the 40s and 50s, instead of your 70-80 bpm. I've seen 38 bpm, from a guy who did 100 miles of bicycle riding any day he felt like it, and chalked up 500+ miles/week. That's a heart like a horse.)
So over time you have to make the workout harder, and then longer, to get the same benefit. If you always do the same course at the same pace, you get less benefit each time. Increase the pace, do a route that's more uphill, or add weight (on your back/body, not on your feet, ankles, or legs. Unless you like corrective arthroscopic surgery.)
Hydrate with small sips of water during the exercise period.
If you're past your prime, go for lower-impact stuff: cartilage doesn't last forever. Ask the guys who did careers jumping out of airplanes how that works out.
The only thing we're going for today or any cardio day is faster heart rate, any way you can get there, sustained for half an hour or so. If you can do that sitting on a bicycle seat or doing laps in a pool, and get another twenty years out of your knees, you're much smarter to do it that way.
The .mil jogs/runs exclusively, because most of them are between 18-40, and they'll bounce back tomorrow.
That probably isn't most of you.
If your knees are fine, and jogging is doing it, but you find that you're only at the bottom end of your target zone, jog for 60 seconds, then run flat out for 15 seconds. Keep doing that until your heart rate is back to the upper end of that Target Zone.
Then cool down, clean up, hydrate, and get back to the rest of the day.
PT today is the same Daily Seven warmups, same reps.
Then spending the balance of the workout on lower body development. Abdominal crunches, leg lifts, flutter kicks, knee bends, etc. Pick out 4 to 6 different exercises.
Do a set of ten of one exercise, sprint or jog in place fast for 1 min, then do a set of the next exercise.
You're working out abdomen, lower back, thighs, calves.
Keep doing the circuit as many times around as you can, until you can't do a full set. Or until workout time is over. Feel the burn.
Then cool down, clean up, hydrate, and on with the Training Day.
This would be the notional third day of your first training week, i.e Wednesday.
Today you should be doing the same Daily Seven, 5-10 reps, whatever you started at. That's for warm-ups. If you want to work in some different exercises on different days, that's okay. Especially if you swap out lightweight one for harder ones.
Then do max reps of pushups (your arms should still be sore from yesterday's UBD (Upper Body Development), a one minute max of sit-ups, and again, a quarter-mile jog. That's it.
For now, you're doing just fine.
Cool down, clean up, hydrate, and get ready for Day Three.
As this would be Tuesday of your notional training week, today you should do the same Daily Seven for warm-ups, with the same number of reps, and then spend the rest of the time working on upper body.
Pull-ups, push-ups, bicep dips, arm curls with weights. Fill an ammo can with sand and do lifts and curls with it. Alternate standing and sitting. You're mainly working out your arms, chest, and upper back muscles, or should be. People walk around all day long, but most folks who don't work at it don't pick up anything heavier than a pencil or their car keys all day, so upper body strength is always the least-developed set of muscles in anyone's body.
Pick a given number of reps. Say ten. Do that many of one exercise.
Do moderate cardio for 1 minute in between each exercise. Anything from running in place to an easy jog. Shake out the arms while you do it. Then hit the next set.
The next set will be a different exercise. Do ten of those. And so on. Shake it off/jog/exercise. Work your way through 4-6 different exercises. Start with the first one again. Repeat until you can't finish a full set of ten.
See how many sets you can do. One, three, six, whatever.
Next time (next Tuesday) you do upper body work, aim for one more rep per set, and one more set of each.
Cool down afterwards, clean up, hydrate, and get ready for the rest of Day Two.
For those to whom it needs to be said, check with your doctor before beginning any training program. Anybody who has a heart attack and starts out by trying to pin it on me, because you've let yourself go, will be cheerfully laughed out the door.
And if your chest or anything else hurts when you're exercising, stop doing that. Pain is sometimes weakness leaving the body. Usually that manifests as sweat, not agony. (If you get to doing BUD/S-level PT, we can talk.) Other times it's your body telling you you've screwed something up. No one else will be there to hold your hand, so you're going to have check yourself, and if something isn't working, get it looked at. You jack yourself up later in life, you aren't going to heal quick like you did when you were a teenager either. You can increase tempo and exertion over time a lot quicker than you can stop, heal, and start all over.
Anybody too crippled up to do anything here should be doubling down and using this time to get better at everything else. So if you're a paraplegic, you better be an awesome mechanic, or the tribe is going to throw you out to face Lord Humungus on your own.
Also, in a notional two-week training phase, you're barely going to be scratching the surface of training yourself and getting into shape. You'll be barely halfway into a toughening phase, and maybe not even that far.
That said, the goal here is to make this part of you. Practice becomes habit, and habit becomes lifestyle. But only if you start.
For a first session, do some light warmup exercises for 10-15 minutes. The fitness training manuals explain what military recruits learn as "The Daily Seven" from those who know them well. Go through the referenced FM, and pick out seven different exercises. The point is to slowly move all your muscles, and get your body warmed up, so that you don't pull anything. Like tendons, ligaments, etc. Select exercises that vary the part stretched, arms, legs, upper body, back, neck, abdomen, etc. Don't do all leg exercises, or all arm exercises, or all simple stretches. Whatever you pick, unless you're in shape already, start small. Do a minute or two of each exercise, at most. Call it 5 to 10 repetitions. Do the stretches s-l-o-w-l-y. You're trying to perform, not break yourself on Day One.
Once you've done them all, there are two fitness standards you should know about. The Army PRT, and the Marine Corps PFT. Quick and dirty, the Army does push-ups (max effort), sit-ups (in 2 minutes), and a timed two-mile run. The Marines do pull-ups (max effort), abdominal crunches (in two minutes), and a timed three-mile run.
Relax, you won't be doing either one. Yet. And I'm not going to start some silly inter-service flame war. Start with the Army PRT model. When you can, move to the Marine PFT model.
But for the first day, do max push-ups, one minute of sit-ups, and a timed quarter-mile jog.
Week Two, and each week afterwards, you're going to add one rep to each exercise in the Daily Seven, until you can get to 20. Each week, add twenty seconds more to the sit-up period, until you're doing the sit-ups for the full two minutes. Every third workout, you'll add 1/4 mile to your run distance, until you're doing the full two miles. That means it'll be 5 weeks, running three days a week, until you're up to 2 miles. (1/4-1/4-1/2-1/2-3/4-3/4-1-1, and so on.) At that point, you start doing the warm-ups more vigorously, and/or pick out some more challenging exercises for your Daily Seven. Jumping jacks and neck stretches are fun. But mountain climbers and flutter kicks build character. You always try to max out on push-ups. Even beyond 100%. Same for sit-ups. Go beyond the max score number in the same time limit. And start pushing up the pace on your run time.
This is for every other day. Call it MWF.
Tuesdays you work on upper body alone. Do the same warm-ups, at the same place you're at. If you have access to low parallel bars, use them. Two sandbags, or coffee cans filled with cement, on end, will allow you to do bicep lifts of your body sitting on the ground. Do push-ups and pull-ups. Rope or pole climbs. Do weight lifts with individual arms, and both arms together, whether it's free weights, machines, bowflex, or paint buckets full of cement.. Your goal is to just work out your upper body: shoulders, biceps, and forearms.
Thursday, you work on lower body: abdomen and legs. Crunches, flutter kicks, mountain climbers. If you can, do sit-ups where your body starts head down, your legs are on a table, and you use your back muscles to do reversed sit-ups.
Each time you do focused workouts, warm up well, start where you can, and gradually increase time spent and repetitions.
Saturdays, you work on cardio. Walk fast, jog, bicycle, swim, whatever. Do it easier than your MWF runs, but for longer periods of time.
Sundays are a day of recreational rest. Go to the park, the zoo, an amusement park, take an easy hike somewhere, play a sport. You're not working out, you're just not laying like a slug. Think of it as an all day stretch for some muscles that'll be tired.
You can score yourself here: Army push-up standards. Army Sit-up standards. Army two-mile run standards.
Don't worry cupcakes, they have male and female columns, and they list the scores handicapped, all the way to the 62+ age bracket. (Feel free to compare yourself with 18-year-old studs, and up your game, once you're in the groove.)
The entire program is here: Army PRT.
If/when you transition to the Marine card: Marine Corps PFT scoring.
That's the 18-y.o. stud standard. You can dig around the internet on your own for the older age brackets.
Military.com, (the link for the USMC scoring) also has additional links to things like circuit courses, interval training, and other military fitness and agility tests.
Start with the basics, until you've achieved mastery, then you can start varying your routine.
That will be hard enough, from a cold start.
Your goal is not to over-train or overuse your muscles and body, but to slowly and steadily build in progression until you reach and maintain a healthy and useful level of fitness. Nobody wants you broken, but you're no good to anybody, including yourself, if you can't move and manipulate your own body weight, and do useful work, in any number of tough times and situations.
You can figure out the days, but space them as I've indicated, and start slow.
If you miss a day, whether it's because you're a lazy fat bastard (like I sometimes am), or because work and life occasionally get in the way, get back on the horse the next day, and make it up.
Not counting the news outlets or websites along the full range of accuracy and veracity, I follow multiple actual individuals' handwritten blogs. (Bot news aggregators don't thrill me.) Looking them over, many are current serving or former military and a couple are some variation of high-speed low-drag elite forces ninjas. Or just funny as all. Because life without humor is just despair. So in other words, the same folks I trusted in the military not to wet the bed, sh*t themselves, or otherwise run around like headless Nancys, are the same folks I trust on the interwebz, for demonstrating pretty much the same trustworthiness and circumspectly responsible behavior. Color me shocked.
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